CRAZY FISTS

GOLDEN BOY (1939)
dir: Rouben Mamoulian

BODY AND SOUL (1947)
dir: Robert Rossen

CRAZY FISTS
MAD #95, June 1965
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker

This is more of an amalgam of several different old movies, but most closely following the plot of Golden Boy, the story of a young boy who wants to be a boxer, but his parents object and want him to be a musician.

The son here is George Chakiris and the mother is Bette Davis.

Gus is Keenan Wynn.

Mona Schwartz is Suzanne Pleshette.

-Sammy Davis Jr. was in a musical also called Golden Boy.
-Blackie Finster is played by Buddy Hackett.

The referee is Don Knotts.

If you have the time, here's the movie in its entirety.

THE TYPICAL "SUCCESS STORY" MOVIE OF THE PAST/FUTURE
MAD #126, April 1969
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

Follows the plot of Golden Boy a little more closely. It has two of the same actors and has the same story of a man wanting to be a boxer over his father's objections of wanting him to be a concert violinist. Once he gets into the boxing underworld and is involved with organized crime, he goes back to the life his father wanted and goes back to the girlfriend he grew up with.

In this version, Joey is played by John Garfield, who was William Holden in the original. The father in both versions is Lee J. Cobb. In the modern version he is Dustin Hoffman and the father is David Niven.

His girlfriend is caricatured as Priscilla Lane, who was Barbara Stanwyck in the original Golden Boy. Here she plays the other woman in the boxing world. The new movie has the girlfriend played by Mia Farrow. I don't know if the hippie girl is supposed to be anyone in particular. Tuesday Weld, maybe?

   -The urban legend of smoking bananas was a hoax carried into the mainstream with the claim you could get high from the insides of banana peels. This was perpetuated by a recipe in The Anarchists Cookbook and those thinking the song Mellow Yellow had clues. The hippies were trying to put one over on the squares and apparently it worked with MAD's writers.
   -STP is a motor oil. There is no such drug, it's a takeoff on the fact that some recreational drugs had initials.